Title source:

Glenn originally heard the “Song to the Siren” by the band This Mortal Coil with Liz Fraser singing. He eventually heard the original Tim Buckley version. Glenn likes both versions of the song.

In the song, the “siren” is a mermaid who sings a song so beautiful it lures sailors to to rocks and therefore their deaths. The song is written from the perspective of the sailor singing back to the mermaid and debating what to do.

Glenn was also aware of René Magritte’s eight-painting series from 1953, Le domaine enchante, here Le Domaine Enchanté (IV) depicts an inverted mermaid and the ship she is singing to. The mermaid is neither fish nor human but some monstrous hybrid.

Van Gogh’s Mille Gachet becomes a floating ghost in Glenn Brown’s version, stuck between animal and
plant, and a woman playing the piano.

See also MANDRAKE, with allusions to witchcraft and folklore.


Image source:

Vincent Van Gogh
Mille Gachet at the piano, 1890
Oil on canvas, 102 x 50 cm
Kunstmuseum, Basel

It was found that Van Gogh based this painting on a Japanese print he owned or had access to, as was common practice with the Parisian artists of the time.

There is speculation that Mille Gachet, daughter of Van Gogh’s famous doctor, had rejected Van Gogh’s advances. It is said that to paint this work from life, Van Gogh would have to have been painting from outside a window of the Gachet residence, alluding to his frustartion and inabilty to enter into her life more intimately.


Upside Down:

The fact that the siren is upside-down is a reference to the many works of Georg Baselitz.


Shaped paintings reference:

Salvador Dali
Couple with their Heads Full of Clouds, 1936
Oil and wood, 87 x 66 cm
Museum Boijmans van Beuningen,
Rotterdam, Netherlands

Not counting numerous oval and rounded corner works, Glenn has created two other shaped-painting works: Zombies of the Stratosphere, 1999 and Christ Returns to the Womb, 2009.